blue that they make his fine, fair head seem transparent.

Poterloo comes from Souchez, and now that the Chasseurs have at last
retaken it, he wants to see again the village where he lived happily
in the days when he was only a man.

It is a pilgrimage of peril; not that we should have far to
go--Souchez is just there. For six months we have lived and worked
in the trenches almost within hail of the village. We have only to
climb straight from here on to the Bethune road along which
the trench creeps, the road honeycombed underneath by our shelters,
and descend it for four or five hundred yards as it dips down
towards Souchez. But all that ground is under regular and terrible
attention. Since their recoil, the Germans have constantly sent huge
shells into it. Their thunder shakes us in our caverns from time to
time, and we see, high above the scarps, now here now there, the
great black geysers of earth and rubbish, and the piled columns of
smoke, as high as churches. Why do they bombard Souchez? One cannot
say why, for there is no longer anybody or anything in the village
so often taken and retaken, that we have so fiercely wrested from
each other.

But this morning a dense fog enfolds us, and by favor of the great
curtain that the sky throws over the earth one might risk it. We are
sure at least of not being seen. The fog hermetically closes the
perfected retina of the Sausage that must be somewhere up there,
enshrouded in the white wadding that raises its vast wall of
partition between our lines and those observation posts of Lens and
Angres, whence the enemy spies upon us.